I seem to believe at this point that the occupation (meaning U.S. troops will be there with a system of martial law) will last about 15-20 years. About that time we'll have more important enemies to bomb and our Congress will pull funding on it.

I just hope the killing stops!

Some of those left of center like myself seem to want us out all at once, right now. While I think we should have never have gone in, I think it would be a bad decision to pull out right now. I also firmly believe that the only way to get the Iraqis to control their own destiny is for a tri-partite Iraq. I think the best solution to the problems over there is to divide the country into three separate nations, otherwise it will be anarchy until 2020 with American being killed daily.

5-10 years of my support. But we should be there till the job is done.

A distinction needs to be made between occupation, with all that entails, and a military presence. I think we should finish our occupation and the legal consequences of that in about two years. However, I also believe we will have a standing force there for quite awhile.

Face it, gentlemen: When your country is a superpower; as such your country is fated to become hegemon. There has never been a time in history when a strong country has not ended up as such, regardless of whether out of desire or necessity.

We are a New Rome. We lost the power of avoiding that fate when Woodrow Wilson ignored Washington's caution about foreign entanglements. Once we started that process, it proved impossible to step off that road. It will not be so long before the government in Washington throws off the last vestiges of a Republican form of government and adopt in practice an imperial form.

I agree with the second part of your post, Wry.

Plato outlined what you said in the Republic. Nations with democratic societies or representative governments devolve, over time, into various despotic forms of tyranny. Democratic or representative style govs. always devolve into plutocracy, oligarchy and finally in tyranny. These transformations take years, sometimes centuries but our society is not immune from this phenonmenon.

What is so poignant about Plato's point here, is that he was writing this circa 500 bce. His predictions have played out in all societies all over the world since he wrote about this. For that, Plato was a visionary, a genius!